Love is something that changes our lives, but that does not mean that we have a clear control over this feeling: it influences us, but we cannot influence it. When it comes, it comes. But it always lets us know through what we could call the symptoms of love .

Even though we don’t know the logic that makes love appear, we can be aware, if we pay attention, of those early signals that our body sends us when we start to feel something for someone. Knowing how to detect them helps us to be prepared.

The main symptoms of falling in love

These are the typical signs that appear when love for another person is born . They tell us about both physical and psychological processes, as we shall see.

1. The pulse is accelerated

The typical sign of attraction or, many times, infatuation. The more courage we give to a person, the faster the heart beats and, therefore, if there is infatuation in the middle the rhythm is very high. There is a reason why the heart (or a very simplified and iconic version of it) is the symbol of love.

What is this about? When we see the person we love, our body is activated because we enter a state of alert to try to take voluntary control of all movements and gestures . The aim is, of course, to seduce the other person, or at least not to make him/her go away in a panic.

Even if it is in a half-conscious way, we know that a small detail in what we do can make a difference and decide whether we will spend many years of our life with that person or not.

2. Euphoria appears

This is also one of the typical symptoms of falling in love, and one of the most pleasant and stimulating. The idea that this loved one exists makes us feel better in many ways, and they all come to us at once. For example, we feel less lonely because we have the feeling that someone understands us , and at the same time we imagine a life full of shared projects that would make no sense to undertake alone.

3. Pupils are dilated

Even though we hardly notice it, when someone is very attractive to us, the pupils of our eyes dilate. This is to capture as much detail as possible about what happens when that person we like is around. The idea is to react to the moment to adapt to any situation .

4. We began to fantasize about the future together

Being in love can be overwhelming, because sometimes it leads to a state of tension: we don’t know if the possible relationship with that person will have a future or not, or if it will even start.
To calm this state of slight anxiety and uncertainty, we resort to a habit that is another of the symptoms of falling in love: imagining future situations in which that couple already exists and is consolidated. It is a kind of alternative reality in which we can take refuge so as not to always have to worry about it.

5. Begin to adopt their way of speaking

Many times, when we have already begun to talk to that person and have been able to learn about some of their habits, we tend to adopt aspects of their speech and incorporate them into our own. For example, words invented by the person, expressions and even recurring jokes.

This is not simply to have a strategy to make you like yourself better, as these changes in speech can also occur when that person is not around (although to a lesser extent). What happens is simply that we modify our actions so much because of our involvement in the relationship that without realizing it we start imitating the other person and, in part, we think like that person.

6. Loss of appetite

The relationship between appetite and infatuation is curious.

On the one hand, many people feel that, when the loved one is around, hunger does not exist; they do not feel the need to eat.

On the other hand, crush anxiety, if mismanaged, can lead to binge eating. But the latter only occurs in cases where the crush collides with a feeling of inferiority and self-esteem problems that hinder the relationship. Moreover, is not a real appetite, but an emotional hunger , which leads to eating to compensate for psychological aspects.

7. Recurring thoughts about that person

When we fall in love, we begin to see references to the loved one everywhere: in smells, in sounds, and even some people’s faces remind us of theirs (even if they don’t look anything like it).

What happens is that our memory system learns that the concept of that person is central and very important to us, and begins to make it connect with all kinds of ideas and sensations. At the same time, each of these experiences makes us think about them more frequently , which adds relevance to their memory, creating a vicious circle.

8. We want to know more about her

When we fall in love, we use the information we know about that person to imagine more about them in an almost obsessive way . It is a kind of detective work that we do through our imagination.

For example, if your last name is the name of a town, we find out about that place, we ask ourselves if that person has ever been there, if he or she has walked the streets and parks we see in pictures on the Internet…